On the potential use of echocardiography for assessing the formation of alcoholic cardiomyopathy

Chronic alcohol abuse not only leads to significant human psychic and social degradation, but also promotes the formation of alcoholic cardiomyopathy, which is one of the leading causes of high mortality of alcoholics. However, to date, there are no unified approaches in the prevention and treatment of alcoholic cardiomyopathy in clinics, primarily due to the lack of an adequate model in experimental pharmacology that could assess the stages of the formation of alcoholic cardiomyopathy objectively in real time, and thereby create the basis for the search and study of the mechanisms of action of drugs for the treatment of this serious disease. Studying the possibility of the use of echocardiography in experiments on rats with prolonged forced alcoholism is one of the approaches to solve this problem. It was shown that significant changes in intracardiac echocardiography hemodynamics corresponding to that known from the clinics begin to form from the 20th week of systematic consumption of alcohol by rats. By this time, the reduction in inotropic function of the heart in alcoholized rats compared to control rats is observed: the shortening fraction (SF) is 41.9% (40.3–42.2) and 51.3% (48.8–59.1), respectively, and the ejection fraction (EF) is 78.8% (77.4–79.2) and 87.5% (84.6–92.4), respectively, p ≈ 0.0215. The dilated heart failure develops in rats from the 24th week of regular alcohol consumption, as illustrated not only by the dynamic reduction of SF and EF, but also by the dilatation of the heart. For example, the end-systolic dimension of the left ventricle in animals consuming alcohol compared with the control rats more than doubled (4.31 mm (3.80–4.41) and 2.0 mm (1.85–2.36), p ≈ 0.0008, and the end-diastolic dimension was 5.95 mm (5.13–6.37) and 4.52 mm (3.85–4.90), respectively; p ≈ 0.0171. Thus, the echocardiographic picture characteristic of alcoholic dilated cardiomyopathy is formed by the end of the 24th week of chronic alcoholization.